Two Ways to Bring Shakespeare Into the Twenty-First Century

A production photo of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s collaboration with Intel on “The Tempest.”

Photograph by Topher McGrillis / R.S.C.

For the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Gregory Doran, the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, wanted to dazzle. He turned to “The Tempest,” the late romance that includes flying spirits, a shipwreck, a vanishing banquet, and a masque-like pageant that the magician Prospero stages to celebrate his daughter’s marriage. “The Tempest” was performed at the court of King James I, and it may have been intended in part to showcase the multimedia marvels of Jacobean court masques. “Shakespeare was touching on that new form of theatre,” Doran told me recently, over the phone. “So we wanted to think about what the cutting-edge technology is today that Shakespeare, if he were alive now, would be saying, ‘Let’s use some of that.’ ”

The politics behind Shakespeare and stage illusion are more fraught than usual these days. The Globe Theatre, in London, announced in October that it would part ways with its artistic director, Emma Rice, after a two-year tenure, because of her use of artificial lighting and sound design in a space intended to re-create open-air Elizabethan performance. (Some of Rice’s supporters wondered if her stated commitment to gender parity in a traditionally male-dominated arena had also ruffled feathers.) Doran wanted to evoke the spirit of Shakespeare’s more technologically sophisticated indoor performances. When he asked Sarah Ellis, the R.S.C.’s head of digital development, to find him the contemporary equivalent of Jacobean spectacles, she came back with a two-minute corporate video from Intel in which the C.E.O. describes its digital storytelling initiative while an animated steampunk leviathan swims across a huge screen behind him. Then the magnificent whale bursts off the screen and floats over the heads of the gobsmacked onlookers. Intel agreed to partner with the R.S.C., and Doran decided to focus its technology on Prospero’s pageant and the shape-shifting character of Ariel, Prospero’s magic spirit. The R.S.C. also brought in the Imaginarium Studios, expert in the motion-capture technology that turned its co-founder, Andy Serkis, into Gollum and King Kong onscreen. They equipped the actor playing Ariel, Mark Quartley, with a performance-capture suit, studded with sensors that could transmit his movements and expressions to Intel’s processors, which would then project him as an animated avatar onstage. It would be the first time a digital character was rendered live, in real time, before the audience’s eyes. At a press conference before the production’s première, in Stratford-upon-Avon, last month, Ellis said, “I’m confident that if Shakespeare were alive today, this is what he would want.”

Another scene from ”The Tempest.”

Photograph by Topher McGrillis / R.S.C.

Maybe. On press night, Intel’s processors came through, projecting Ariel onto columns of mosquito netting that descended from the rafters: now a supple sea-nymph, now a vengeful harpy. But the result was a disappointing literalism that insisted on visualizing Shakespeare’s word-painting. When Prospero—played with lucid understatement by the stage veteran Simon Russell Beale—reminded Ariel of his former confinement in “a cloven pine,” tree limbs writhed across the stage; when he described “the baseless fabric of this vision,” he gestured toward a fabric backdrop that had, sure enough, descended just short of the stage’s base. At its best, the design looked like a downmarket version of the C.G.I. animation in Julie Taymor’s 2010 film adaptation of the play. At its worst, during Prospero’s “insubstantial pageant,” when bland pastel landscapes and floral patterns dissolved across the stage, it looked like a PowerPoint presentation built from clip art. As Quartley slowly waved his arms to make his harpy avatar flap its wings, he reminded me of a teen-ager trying out a Nintendo Wii. It was hard to distinguish the novelty of real-time performance from recorded animation, and the whole muddled extravagance seemed at odds with Beale’s subtle turn in the central role.

The real magic in the production came from more conventional sources: the harmonious music that Ariel sang with his spirits; the magnificent ribs of the wrecked ship that flanked the Shakespeare Theatre’s thrust stage; those earthy spirits, hidden from the slave Caliban but visible to the audience, who taunted him by whisking sticks out of his reach; the fools Stephano and Trinculo doing what film actors can’t, responding to audience laughter with ad-libbed asides and hopping into the stalls for byplay with startled spectators; and, best of all, Beale alone in a pool of light on a bare stage, delivering Prospero’s epilogue. When he begged the audience, in the play’s final words, to “set me free,” it was the only time all night I heard a gasp.

The sort of masques that influenced “The Tempest” were designed to show royal authority bringing order out of chaos. This fall, there was another seventeenth-century masque playing in London, John Milton’s “Comus: A Masque in Honour of Chastity,” at the Globe’s candlelit indoor playhouse. That production cocked a revisionist eye at the pageant’s attempt to control a daughter’s sexuality in the name of English power. In a somewhat similar vein, the American playwright Sarah Ruhl’s “Scenes from Court Life,” recently at the Yale Rep, summons the illusion of masques to explore parallels between seventeenth-century English monarchs and the Bush Presidential dynasty, along with the theatrical displays that sustain their power. “The Tempest” itself invites us to ask whether Prospero’s “rough magic” is any different from the spells of the “foul witch Sycorax,” whom he deposed, and whether a magician controlling his minions is a form of enlightened rule or despotism.

But the R.S.C.’s version seems uninterested in exploring anything that might challenge its narrative about the wonders of technological innovation. Where the old masques glorified royals, this one mostly glorifies Intel (which declined to disclose the terms of its financial arrangement with the R.S.C.; promotional materials for “The Tempest” cite the astronomic cost of the masques in King James I’s court). Intel’s vice-president of global marketing, Penny Baldwin, told me that this collaboration was part of a long-term strategy to keep the brand relevant for the next generation of consumers. When my seven-year-old son goes to buy his first drone, she said, they wanted to make sure that he’d demand one with an Intel chip inside.

For a generation now, scholars and theatre directors have probed “The Tempest” for its insights on European colonial expansion, shifting Renaissance gender roles, ecological change, and conflicting views of magic. The R.S.C. has explored some of these concerns in other plays—Doran recently directed an all-black “Julius Caesar” set in postcolonial Africa, for instance. But his “Tempest” is oddly uncritical of its Prospero, a genial white patriarch who brings order to motley island natives, secures an advantageous marriage for his daughter to another white family, forgives his enemies, and then takes early retirement.

Shakespeare’s play is also deeply concerned with who counts as human, with who deserves Prospero’s “humane care.” But the R.S.C.’s exhibition of a South Asian Stephano (Tony Jayawardena), a Lancashire Trinculo (Simon Trinder), and a visibly deformed Caliban (Joe Dixon) being mined for laughs, while the aristocratic characters speak Shakespeare’s verse in plummy cadences, with only one female part (Jenny Rainsford’s forceful Miranda) among them, seems to contract the circle of care. “Shakespeare is for everyone,” Doran told me. On this night, however, it was hard to tell.

The current production that’s really bringing Shakespeare into the twenty-first century is a trilogy at the Donmar, at King’s Cross. It features revivals of the company’s acclaimed “Julius Caesar,” from 2012, and “Henry IV,” from 2014, alongside a new “Tempest” that opened this fall, with a transfer to New York slated for January. It is performed, under the direction of Phyllida Lloyd, on a bare stage by an all-female company of every shape and hue.

The conceit is that the actors are inmates of a women’s prison, putting on these plays to grapple with questions of revenge, reformation, and forgiveness. It might seem gimmicky save for the company’s collaboration with Clean Break, a theatre venture that works with women in the criminal-justice system: the actors’ performances are rooted in the lives of real inmates, who are evoked in photo displays in the theatre’s lobby. (An actor portraying an inmate introduces each play and explains its personal significance.) The setup also creates unexpected historical rhymes; when the harsh blare of a prison alarm interrupts the performance, and uniformed guards march in to quell an unruly scene, it evokes an anxiety that Shakespeare must have understood: what it means to stage a play about power for a higher authority who could silence it in an instant. Queen Elizabeth I shut down a production of “Richard II” because it featured a deposition scene that she feared would incite her enemies; Shakespeare was probably the only major playwright among his contemporaries not to be charged, punished, or killed. At the end of the Donmar’s “Tempest,” a liberated Ariel leaves behind a copy of “Hag-Seed,” Margaret Atwood’s new novel about an exiled artist staging Shakespeare’s play in a Canadian prison. The lights fade as the inmate who plays Prospero reads the novel in her cell. She’s sentenced to life without parole, never to be set free.

There are high-tech elements in these productions, but they always serve the plays’ vision of shifting power. Julius Caesar speaks into a handheld camera, live-streamed onto surveillance screens that ring the theatre, holding an authoritarian press conference—until the assassins strike, and the footage becomes a terrifying execution video. For Prospero’s “insubstantial pageant,” aerial shots of tropical islands are projected onto giant white balloons, tethered to homely water bottles; the inmates sigh at such an evanescent vision of freedom. When the revels are ended, Prospero bursts each balloon. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” he says, and, in Harriet Walter’s wrenching delivery, it has never sounded so wistful.

Walter felt she had maxed out on women’s parts at the R.S.C. after starring as Cleopatra there, in 2006; at the Donmar, she played Brutus and Henry IV on the same day she did Prospero. When the rebel lords in “Henry IV” spray-paint a map of Britain on the stage to divide their spoils, their Irish, Scottish, West Indian, and Latina voices—jibing, singing, and shouting Shakespeare’s exuberant verse—sound like the nation itself. The audience, too, was the youngest and most diverse that I found in London. (The Donmar’s own corporate partner, Delta Air Lines, helped to make a quarter of the tickets free to anyone under twenty-five.) After six hours—with meal breaks—the entire house leapt to a standing ovation. That’s common enough in the U.S., but it was the only time on a two-week trip that I saw Londoners so enraptured—not from being stunned by spectacle but from being enlisted in a collective act of inclusive imagination. When Jade Anouka, the magnetic actor who played Hotspur, boasted that she could “pluck bright honor from the pale-faced moon,” she drilled a punching bag while a d.j. cued the start of Kanye West’s “Power.” “I am living in the twenty-first century,” he raps. At the Donmar, I believed it.

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner teaches English at Linfield College, in Oregon.